Rendering for Creatives

Do you know what happens to your design after you send it to the printer? Why should you care?

The tools in Creative Cloud help to turn your brightest ideas into your greatest work. Maybe you just broke new ground with a new feature from the latest update of Adobe Illustrator CC or Photoshop CC and you pushed the envelope beyond anything you’ve done before. After applying the finishing touches, and obtaining approval, it’s time to send your design to the printer.

As a medium, print is tactile, high impact and non-intrusive. It can be essential to winning the attention of your audience and anchoring your message in a crowded media landscape. But print is expensive, so the stakes are high.

The prepress department at your printer will carefully examine the structure of the job. Accurately reproducing your design on a printing press requires specialised skills and techniques. The prepress function consists of a series of stages, of which rendering is the most critical. The text, graphics and images of your design will be broken down, in a series of steps, into atomic elements. Transparency, knock-outs and other complex effects will be reduced and simplified. Your rich palette of carefully selected hues will be funneled into a small number of separated printing colourants, each of which will be screened into half-tone dots. The rendering stage performs these operations at high speed, producing billions of pixels in a continuous stream which instructs the inkjet heads or laser beams, when and where colour is to be applied to the substrate.

The PDF Print Engine is Adobe’s state-of-the-art rendering technology. It is built into prepress solutions from leading graphic arts manufacturers. The Print Engine uses the same core technologies employed by Acrobat DC, Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC. This lowers the chance of discrepancies and increases predictability: what you view on-screen is exactly what you will get when ink hits paper.

If your printer uses the Adobe PDF Print Engine, you can rest assured that your artistic vision will print as expected – no surprises!